February6, 2018

“We just cut taxes by what is going to amount to $2 trillion. The immediate impact of that is that we are going to hit the debt ceiling sooner than we had expected to because less revenue is coming into the treasury. ...

“I could make an argument that in so doing, this Congress made a public policy decision that we were not going to fund defense at the levels that this Committee thinks they should. We decided not to fund it and, ‘OK, well there’s other places we can get the money.’ But the President has said he is not going to reform mandatory spending at all; the State of the Union address I think promise more money than I think I can possibly imagine. … So I worry greatly about how this strategy is going to be implemented in the face of our deficit and our debt. And if interest rates go up? I mean we’ve been incredibly lucky that we’ve been able to borrow all this money on the cheap. If interest rates go up to 3%, you can forget about all this stuff. … Our overall budget picture doesn’t add up, and I worry that will wind up costing the men and women who serve—costing our ability to give them the training and the equipment they need to carry out the missions that we all hear that we need.”